What has been overrated from day one is the golden boy. There are no good players in Toronto for which Demar, and Davis to learn from.

It's ugly

+1000

role models are huge for mental development, one player right off my head i could think of is evan turner. dude was surrounded by the right guys to teach him the ropes, and right now he's been lighting up the league and looking like the brandon roy type player he was predicted to be.

If you think this on coaching your not watching the games. These guys can't dribble, shoot, or pass. If this is Casey fault its because he hasen't told derozan and johnson they are not allowed to move with the ball

Casey should also tell Johnson and DeMar to give up hanging around the triple stripe

If we are ever to see if Ed or DeMar are keepers, we need to let them play and develop. It will make for some ugly nights but spot duty will not help anyone. Also I thought Casey using Forbes and minutes was good in Boston despite the results...

When we wake up tomorrow , the truth is we do not have a very good squad and will lose more than we win. I just want to see a plan to get better. Play the draft picks and try to run some more cause no one outside the internationals can shoot in a stagnant offence. Would love to see Paul Westhead be an assistant. Hopefully Bayless will bring a little more tempo and put some heat on Jose.

Right now, DeMar looks lost and well, young. Davis seems to be a slightly better version of Reggie Evans, there's massive question marks around Bayless and well, I can't think of any other players.

But, it's been pretty interesting to see how our team has struggled with them. They just haven't taken then next step, when the opportunity is there.

Could a lot of this be do to not having a proper training camp?

I for one can never be accused of over rating our youth, in fact I continually found myself in a very beat down minority because of it. That said I don't blame guys for doing it, it's easy to get excited, especially when there has been little to look forward to.

Lets face it, most here won't admit it, but we get all our basketball via the media in one way or another. They control what we see and HOW we see it. Your local media will help pump up and hype your young talent. National and Global media hop on the wagon for the higher picks, the lottery guys, and they create realities for these players. I truly believe that coming out of College, the NBA and the Media create stars. I would bet there are better players than Chris Paul that had spotty personal lives or were far too hard to listen to in the media so they weren't hyped and promoted as the next big thing. Thats why you see so many "BUSTS". These guys aren't busts, they are the same guys they were in College or High School. They just didn't pan out, they couldn't improve or take advantage of the free ride they got, and lets be honest, there is a new crop every year so the media and the NBA marketing machine don't mind tearing these kids to pieces after they have set them up to fail because they had a very nice and easy to market package coming in....but couldn't cut it.

I rip Derozan, we all do, Bargs, Davis, we are unfair. They weren't that good to start with. Derozan played like 20 college games and was average. We were told he was athletic, yet you could watch the Youtube tapes and think..."he ain't that athletic, a dude I know at the YMCA does dunks like that in games", AND YOU WERE RIGHT!!!

So the short answer is yes. We over value our youth. But cut yourselves some slack, you have a lot of help and encouragement. Never forget guys, the NBA is a company, it's an entertainment company and it is a damn good one. Natural progression and logic doesn't always apply.

how could we overrate our youth when we're expecting a top three pick this year? all this is impatiences and high expectations. we've all seen demar's lack of range, his inability to beat someone off the dribble and his poor defence. we all know the player he is, but for some reason, most of the world expected all those problems to be resolved. we're just dumb fans.

when you don't have any quality veterans, and haven't really had any for a long time, what choice do you have but to put your hopes, as a sports fan, in the team's future? this is amplified when your team has trouble acquiring any quality via free agency. the draft is our ticket, and it's a real gamble. but that's really our only option.

and if we hope to get better via trades, we need assets. given all of the above, hyping our youth increases value before they have too much of a chance to prove us wrong. there's an important marketing ploy in this in terms of trade scenarios.

and, on top of that, they need to sell tickets. bargnani, carter, magloire, kleiza and the like aren't really going to push season tickets, are they?

when you don't have any quality veterans, and haven't really had any for a long time, what choice do you have but to put your hopes, as a sports fan, in the team's future? this is amplified when your team has trouble acquiring any quality via free agency. the draft is our ticket, and it's a real gamble. but that's really our only option.

and if we hope to get better via trades, we need assets. given all of the above, hyping our youth increases value before they have too much of a chance to prove us wrong. there's an important marketing ploy in this in terms of trade scenarios.

and, on top of that, they need to sell tickets. bargnani, carter, magloire, kleiza and the like aren't really going to push season tickets, are they?

This is so true, everybody we have always wanted to target via trades, end up saying that they dont want to come to Toronto because of various reasons. So our only way is to really go through the draft, and sign below avg players and hype them up because in reality we really cant get any all stars here that will be wiling to come up north of the border it seems theese days

ok i don't know the exact numbers but a quick google search indicated that he signed a 34 million over 5 year extension. That works out to 6.8 per year, which to me seems a lot for a role player.

that's really the problem i have with this roster. It seems like everyone with the exception of Bargnani lack the talent to be anything other that hard working role players. All these guys that i like (Amir, James Johnson, Derozan, Ed Davis) - don't get me wrong, i like them - but they don't seem actually all that good.

$5 mil in his first year, and then $5.5, $6, $6.5, $7 over the next 4 years.

he's totally affordable right now and probably next year, and after that we'll probably be capped out anyways, so it's not big deal unless we appraoch the lux tax.

he's our best defensive big, an energy guy, and probably one of our key bigs over the next 3-4 years. in his last year he will likely be overpaid (although who knows, he could get better), but then again, what players aren't usually overpaid in the last year of a multi-year deal?

i dunno, when 3 or 4 years out of 5 are good value, i'm pretty willing to excuse the last year.

there was some debate originally about the total value of the contract, but it was later settled that it was $30 mil, not $34. i would be surprised if there was any publication since 2010 that listed his salary as $34 mil.

all the major salary sites list it in the values i gave. where did you find the $34 mil?